Edinburgh Fringe Review: Anyone’s Guess How We Got Here at Zoo

Until 28th August

Anyone’s Guess How We Got Here at Zoo, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2017.

A sledgehammer swings into flaming rubble. Darkness pours down her. A body. A rustle in the corner. A gap in the fence and a word between the line. They drive away and we don’t see them fall. Anyone’s Guess is a ghost story. Best told around a campfire (with a neon tube or two to spare), this is a tale of everyday monsters ready to eat you up. It looks at how what you owe and what you own can define and destroy you. How debt – emotional or financial- can burn a house and rip the skin from a skeleton.

When a story is not allowed to end it naturally deviates from its original plot points. It gets more outrageous and less realistic as it is forced to add new details. Barrel Organ make the concept of debt into such a story. It doesn’t just go away when you want it to. It grows like a tumour, clutching to you, hollowing you out.

Following their previous shows Nothing and Some People Talk About Violence, Barrel Organ have a weight of expectation on them. They play with this lightly, like a ball for the audience to catch. What to do with a long car journey? Time for a game? But Anyone’s Guess takes a different path from the company’s previous work, leaving behind the racing circles and competitions. There are traits that lean into their past: the disjointed style, the same breath leaping from one mouth to the other, the little unexpected moments to trip up audience expectations. Nothing played with form, then Some People played with words. Here, Anyone’s Guess plays with time.

In some ways, Anyone’s Guess has none of this intensity. The sledgehammer and the flames are just a postage stamp. It’s a casual chat in a car that makes up the envelope. Bryony Davies and Rosie Gray are in trackies. One has a coffee cup. There are gaps of silence as they wait for someone to think of something to say. But it’s that everyday-ness of the show’s opening that makes the darkness what it is.

Jack Perkins’ writing doesn’t hold the tight logic of Lulu Raczka’s work. It carries a different energy, slightly wilder and more unruly. There are gaps plugged with blu-tak, when what it really needs is superglue.

The infuriating delight of Barrel Organ is their non-linear thinking, the feeling that they are always one step ahead, or rather one step sideways. The final image in Anyone’s Guess is unnecessarily obvious, a fun but on-the-nose decoration kicking its way into the otherwise nuanced direction. It should have been a white out.

Anyone’s Guess How We Got Here is on at Zoo Venues until 28th August. Click here for more details.